Svetlana Alexievich Is No Useful Idiot

Related Books:

1.“Our life here is just so much absurdity.” – Svetlana Alexievich

When Svetlana Alexievich and I sat down to speak in Kyiv earlier this year, I felt I’d seen this woman — all five-foot-nothing of her — before. Every day, there she is: solid as an axe handle, unyielding as a work of monumentalist sculpture. It was someone like this who tutored me in the bloodsport of Saturday morning marketing among Kyiv’s senior set. Aggression, but no violence, she might counsel. There’s one butcher we trust. If you plan to get in on his veal, show up early and show resolve. Lean in, with elbows.

I’ve also seen someone like this at my church in her tightly wrapped fleur-de-lis headscarf, weeping in front of the icon of Our Lady of Pirogoscha. The image attends silently to her supplications concerning her family — the husband drinking again and the son-in-law conscripted, sent east to the Front. She prays long and turns to leave, her hands hang limp at her sides. What solace will the semper virgine bring?

On this day, though, I know her name: she’s Svetlana Alexievich, of Minsk, Belarus, and she is the 2015 Nobel Laureate for Literature. A cat-eyed neighborhood sergeant-at-arms, with her purposeful walk and her pricey Italian boots — as incongruous as they are pristine, what with the rain we’ve been having, the April dark, and the grimy adventure of negotiating sidewalks in post-Soviet cities.

2.“Russian books are not read in decent homes.” – Ivan Turgenev

Alexievich is a writer whose métier is surpassed perhaps only by her method in the level of righteous alarm it invokes among the Russian literati. The child of a Ukrainian mother and Belarussian father, Svetlana is not ethnically Russian; raised in the political realities of Russification, of Sovietification, she has always written in the dominant language of the region. This, in light of the subject matter she addresses, has resulted in a somewhat awkward recognition of her contribution to the fabled Russkiy Mir of refined culture. Russian writers from across the talent spectrum have chimed in to declare her “not one of us.” Until very recently, her books were — if not banned — reserved from sale in her home country. A 2005 National Book Critics Circle win for Voices from Chernobyl and the 2013 French Prix Médicis Essai for Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets did little to assuage the miffed nativism of local critics, but it was the awarding of the Nobel Prize that effectively flipped the datestamp on the Russian critical response back to 1938, or 1953, or 1970.

Despite a set of remarkably brief and sanitized media reports about Nobel’s recognition of the velik i magooch russkiy yazyk (the grand and mighty Russian language), the award resulted in a more sustained series of denunciations of her work and person from major state-sponsored media. In language that would not feel out of place in a pulp fiction spy novel, Oleg Pukhnavtsev, writing for the Literaturnaya Gazeta, summed up the attitude well: “Alexievich is a classic anti-Soviet…a traitor.”

Still other publications invoked obscure World War II metaphors to underscore Alexievich’s bad behavior, even calling on long-time fellow traveler and Italian journalist Giulietto Chiesa, who checked in from Rome, publishing a scathing condemnation in KULTURA, “the newspaper of Eurasian Russia’s Spiritual, Intellectual Realm:” “Ms. Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for statements that have no basis in reality. The award is a manipulation — an attack on Russia and Putin. A political act that has nothing to do with literature.” Lesser critics lifted the exact wording from reports published in 1970 to denounce Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel, hinting at gross fabrications of sources and citations.

I have read five of Alexievich’s books. The revelations of criminality, brutality, bestiality, and degeneracy offered up by “ordinary people” and recorded by Alexievich are not for the squeamish, and the onslaught beggars credulity.

In the production of a book, Alexievich interviews up to 500 people, of which perhaps a quarter of the recorded remarks — whole or in part — will make it into the published volume. When she does identify the source of a citation, she often does so with a minimum of information — a job title, military rank, or family relationship. One may conclude, reasonably, that she is, strictly speaking, operating outside the realm of peer review and libel. Ranging from subtle to outright, condemnations of the Soviet regime out of the mouths of her subjects in her reporting are not infrequent, and are suspiciously pitch-perfect. Workshopped diatribes whose ear for Soviet stereotype would make a Ronald Reagan speechwriter blush. In Voices From Chernobyl, a widow describes in stoic terms her husband’s life and death as a Chernobyl “evacuator” (hazard containment and salvage). Note the critique, and the Russian “answer to everything.”

I got one thing out of him: ‘It’s the same there as it is here’…they’d serve the ordinary workers noodles and canned foods on the first floor…and the bosses and generals would be served fruit, red wine, mineral water on the second. Up there they have clean tablecloths, and a dosimeter for every man…ordinary workers didn’t get a single dosimeter for a whole brigade.

Another time the nurse from the nearby clinic comes, she just stands in the hallway and refuses to come in.‘Oh, I can’t!’ she says. And I can? I can do anything. What can I think of? How can I save him? He’s yelling, he’s in pain, all day he’s yelling. Finally, I found a way: I filled a syringe with vodka and put that in him. He’d turn off…

Alexievich and I met several times over the last year and spoke about her work. Perhaps the Russian critics aren’t off — she has axes to grind. Prize money to earn. She offers a wealth of biographical detail — born after the War into the family of a Soviet Army officer; not unsympathetic to the merits of the Soviet System; proudly listed among the ranks of those educated to engineer the Evil Empire, to heal it, to keep its books.

Viewed from book-distance, Alexievich could easily have continued to satisfy my expectations of the Nobel laureate, viz: political ideologue posing as writer publishing in any language as long as it is not English. Had time and fate not conspired to allow me to meet her in person, she also could have easily persisted as the very template of the honorable Soviet subject betrayed by history. The former stolnik of the regime now conscripted via American political manipulations into the role of the fitfully content democrat, one reconciled provisionally to the advantages of democracy that accompany the advent of discretionary income.

In the end, it is the 24 years that I have lived in the post-Soviet space that helps to convince me of Alexievich’s veracity. Those 24 years combined with the hours spent with her books, and now, the hours spent in her presence. This is no drone. No fictional cipher. No useful idiot. No soulless minion or Cold War rhetoric made flesh. The surest evidence is the body of work she has assembled and spread across seven books written over these last thirty years. Books that give voice to the historically voiceless. She has traveled across a territory with the land surface of the planet Mars, on trips that have resulted in the preservation of thousands of first-person testimonies of human history at its most brutal. Hardly an effort born of servility, ideology, or deceit.

I ask her about repentance — a word that repeats throughout the books that she describes as her “History of Red Civilization.” “Who needs to repent?” I ask. “And to whom?”

You know, I was a part of that. Invested in that superstition of the time and place, that colossal error, and it’s a very difficult thing to free yourself of. That’s why people were so ready to talk to me. I didn’t make myself out to be somebody with answers about what had gone wrong or what was coming next. We had no idea how it could all fall apart so quickly, or how quickly it would all come back to life. The idea itself, of real, substantive equality, is eternal. It’s beautiful. But somehow, in the Russian application of it, it always ends in a river of blood. So they talk to me.

I’d been a believer in it, just the same as they were. But I don’t know if I’d call what we’re doing ‘repentance.’ It’s more like reconsideration. We’re just talking to understand ourselves. American oversight played a big role in Germany coming to an understanding of its past, and we didn’t have that advantage. Didn’t have what was needed…the moral strength, the understanding, the intellectual elite, so many things. We’ve had to come to grips with our history as a people on our own. And so I set out to write that ‘why.’ That history of Red Civilization — Russian style.

Alexievich offers another word to describe herself:

I’m an accomplice. When glasnost came I was with everybody else running around the square shouting ‘Freedom! Freedom!,’ even if we didn’t have any idea what that meant. And when freedom showed up, and Yeltsin quickly transformed into Tsar Boris, and the oligarchs into his boyars, we understood soon enough that all we really wanted was a better life. I was part of that — past and present. And because of that disconnect, that ‘freedom’ looked shockingly similar to what we were trying to get rid of, that’s what interested me.

Not more utopia. We’d had that. We had books filled with lofty thoughts of literary types and what they had to say about the big questions of freedom and dignity. But I wanted to know what were the little people thinking. What was down in the shit? The dust. What did they want? Did they manage to get it? And the more I talked to them, the more frightening it became. The more pitiable. And it begins to occur to me at some point that Shalamov [Varlam Shalamov was a Russian writer whose work focuses on the Gulag] was on the right track in Kolyma Tales when he said that they were all poisoned by the North. That he came out of the camp as much victim as executioner. But the rest of us, the ones who made it work, we weren’t ready to make that distinction. To say who was who. We still aren’t.

In a 2009 report, the International Federation of Journalists reported that in the period following the breakup of the Soviet Union, 313 Russian journalists had disappeared or been killed in suspicious circumstances — 124 of those in murders linked irrefutably to their investigative work. Another phrase that describes Alexievich: exceptio probat regulam. She is one journalist who wasn’t shot, despite publishing three decades’ worth of indictment of the Soviet regime.

She spent the better part of the 2000s living away from Belarus in Western Europe, an existence made possible by a string of writing fellowships and the occasional prize money. But Svetlana Alexievich’s heart was bent on home. “Apart from my source, I couldn’t write. I had to go back.”

Now that she has, and despite Belarus’s retrograde take on freedom of expression, she does not worry about personal repression.

It’s funny in an odd way, you know. These great, powerful, dominating men who are so tender when you criticize them. He’s in a bit of a spot now, Lukashenko, [Belarus’s president since 1994]; he’s started cozying up to the European Union now with the money that used to come in from Moscow being spent on the war in Ukraine. So, yes, I’m still persona non grata, but he can’t pretend I don’t exist, and the books, my books, are being published and shipped in from Russia. They’re outrageously expensive, but there’s been a real raising of consciousness. People are learning who they are. What they’ve come through. When they recognize me on the street, they just come straight up for a hug. Maybe a photo. They’re worn down by living in this degraded system. They feel their complaint has been heard.

If Flaubert was ‘a man of the quill,’ then perhaps I am ‘a woman of the ear.’ My interviews aren’t interviews as such. Just talks. We just talk and my role is to listen. Listening was difficult at first because of the cognitive dissonance I experienced. All that we’d believed in.

I’ve talked about my father before. He was a beautiful man. He lived life well, and until the day he died he was a Communist. He believed in that idea, real justice, particularly for those who can’t defend themselves. But I had just come back from Afghanistan, and I ran up to him and I said, ‘Papa, we’re murdering them. That’s not what you stand for.’ He never questioned that his faith was well-placed.

Communists come in all sizes. And the idea itself — if the idea is about justice — isn’t going anywhere. I argued with university students in France and they insist that our generation got it all wrong when it followed Lenin instead of Trotsky. It’s astounding, but they’re reading Trotsky and insisting they’re not going to make the same mistake as we did. I’d been traveling to Siberia — Omsk, Tomsk — for Secondhand Time and if you think Marxism is gone out of fashion except in American universities, think again. Dostoevsky said you’ll always find these inquiring young men gathering at the watering hole dreaming about revolution, about how to make the world better. In Russia, now, their motivation is homegrown. It’s Putin. These students read Marx, Lenin, Trotsky — you can hardly believe it — and they’re putting the current regime to the test.

You know, there was all this noise about how surprised the West is that Putin has turned into this retrograde leader. That we couldn’t predict what he’d turn into today. Nonsense. Anyone who was paying attention from the first months after he came to power knew what was coming. Suddenly, the TV was filled with all those films again about the heroic NKVD and the KGB, and about the partisans, and the songs about the ‘core principals.’ All those books about Stalin. One after the other, about the women he loved, and the cigarettes he smoked, all that personal interest stuff. There were very public, State-led efforts to clear Beria’s name, turn him into some sort of social reformer. And now they’re opening a new Stalin museum and over in Perm they fired the old staff at the ‘Victims of the Gulag Museum’ and it’s been renamed ‘Workers of the Gulag Museum.’

Republicans, democrats, communists. Good ones and not-so-good. I just know I can’t fight that fight any longer. And feel no prerogative to convince anyone that there can be such a thing as a good and decent Communist. There were, in their own right. They worked for the public good. Compare them with what we’ve got going now. You have to think for yourself.

I also cannot cover a war anymore. Cannot add to that storehouse of bad dreams. Instead I’m trying to talk to them, to listen to them about love. But this is hard for us. It’s not how our culture is built. We don’t connect to the concept of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ so easily. And the result is that every story about love — about when you first met, when you looked into each other’s eyes — inevitably turns into a story of pain. Ours is not a happy culture. Not defined by a Protestant ethic — make a family and raise a family. But I will finish this book about love, though it might be not what you expect.

5.“Along with the whole world, I revere Russia humane and splendid…but I have no love for the Russia of Beria, Stalin, and Putin…” – Svetlana Alexievich

We sit in the great hall of what was once the Shoemakers’ Union Cultural Center. The wind is howling outside, a spring front coming through. In two weeks in Kyiv we will be commemorating 30 years since Chernobyl exploded and poisoned the land. And across from me sits this woman with a Nobel Prize and who wrote about the disaster. But her answers to the questions raised have been long, conditional, occasionally contradictory, enigmatic, riddling. As if every voice she’s heard would now say its part.

I want to go home. Watch Friends or anything that isn’t about murder, betrayal, brutality, or in Russian. Those immaculate leather boots. I cannot unsee her as the grandma who taught me to stand my ground in the market. The one who shoos the drunks out of the lobby of my building. Or those I saw on Maidan, soup pots defiantly on their heads after the president issued his emergency order to outlaw the public wearing of helmets, and threatened to arrest anyone caught wearing one.

This seemingly familiar woman who speaks with a tiny, delightful lateral lisp that turns the word oskarblennie (insult) into birch leaves rattling in a spring breeze. In a corner of the world as glamour-obsessed as Ukraine, she doesn’t stand out. Yet she is ready to probe the cancer of the world.

The Nobel Committee, prone to miscalculation, overstatement, and the conflation of literature with something else, insists that Svetlana Alexievich has unveiled a new genre of serious literature — a claim that Studs Terkel could have summarily dismantled. It is fair to say, however, that Alexievich has used her time of grace to produce a body of work that resembles little else in the literary firmament. A body of work in which — to the limits that her critics are correct — she does, indeed, write very little. But in doing so, she has managed to unleash the power of the collective memoir. Her authorial pose resembles something far more ancient, and far less drama-laden than the usual soviet dissident fare. As a writer she is very nearly invisible.

Invisible, but no longer unknown.

In a global political environment oriented less and less toward seeking elegant solutions to emerging political complexities, the work of Svetlana Alexievich serves as worthy admonition of the real danger of leaders who stop listening to their people. But talk to her about her importance as a public intellectual and she scoffs. She’s not interested in becoming the high counselor, seeking consensus, or striving to convince. She is content just to listen, and then to write down what she hears, that it not be lost.

Il’ja Rákoš
is a staff writer for the Millions. An American resident of the post-Soviet space for nearly 25-years, his work has concentrated on the cultural sphere of Eastern Europe, appearing in Russian and Ukrainian at cultprostir.ua and LB.ua. He is the author of an essay collection in Ukrainian, Os' Khristianska Vira. Kyiv is home.

When you write, it’s important to do it while you have the enthusiasm for the idea. Maybe the most important period of your writing is when are convinced that your idea is the best idea any writer ever has had. So you have to use that energy because the time will come when you wake up in the morning and you will doubt your idea.

Jesse Ball’s novel The Curfew is described as a dystopian father-daughter tale set in an unnamed city of the future where music is outlawed. It’s a quick and engrossing read—not nearly as sci-fi as that description suggests. The story follows William Drysdale and his daughter, Molly, as they adjust to life in a world where people just disappear without explanation, including Molly’s mother. There are revolutionaries who tell William that they know what happened to his wife, but he must sneak out to meet them and risk his life by staying out past the strictly enforced curfew.
Ball, also a poet, writes in lyrical prose that is never cryptic or overly descriptive. His previous work includes Samedi the Deafness (2007), The Way Through Doors (2009) and the story "The Early Deaths of Lubeck, Brennan, Harp & Carr", which won The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize in 2008 and is highly disturbing and wonderful. His writing is often called minimalist, because the paragraphs are short, the dialogue isn’t punctuated with quotation marks, and unnecessary descriptions are cut. But it isn’t minimal in emotion or imagination.
The Curfew is divided into three parts that flow into each other the way a dream wanders and evolves, finally leaving you awake, wondering what it all meant.
When I learned that Ball teaches a course on lucid dreaming at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, I was eager to speak with him about how you teach someone to take control of her dreams and what that has to do with writing. While our phone conversation seems to range from chess hustlers to dream yogis, it reveals a writer who is driven by a fervent imagination and inspired by the power of storytelling.
The Millions: I read a review online and the writer asks, “What on earth is this book about?” so that’s what I’ll ask first.
Jesse Ball: We’re all put in to difficult circumstances in our life and we have to decide how we can create our own life within that, so I think the core of the book is about how a family can create interior circumstances or render inconsequential whatever difficulties the world forces on them.
TM: What was the first idea for the book, did you want to write about the father-daughter relationship?
JB: The first idea was actually the strategy that the revolutionaries are employing to try to defeat the government. That was the germ of the idea.
TM: So it was political in origin?
JB: I generally am a person who loves games, and strategy, so it was more of an abstract exercise in strategy.
TM: What kinds of games? Are you a chess player?
JB: I love chess. I spend much too much time playing chess.
TM: Do you play online, or at the park?
JB: I play at parks. I used to play at Washington Square Park.
TM: Those guys are amazing, but they’re hustlers. Did you ever get hustled?
JB: In chess you can kind of tell who’s better than you and who you’re better than. There’s a range of hustlers with different abilities. So you can show up with 20 bucks, or 40, 50 bucks—however much you want to use—and play some guys who you think you can beat, and you can take their money, and then you can play the other ones who are better than you and sort of give it back.
TM: Do you decide how much to bet before you play?
JB: You look around, see who’s playing, and check out the different abilities of the guys. It’s not always ironclad when you're watching that a person is playing as well as they can. Some people can give a good hustle so they play badly at first and lose on purpose, and then win in the long run. In athletics I think it’s easier to play badly on purpose. But in chess usually you can tell how good a person is—sometimes just by physical mannerisms. One of the first giveaways is, if you're about to play chess with somebody, mess up the pieces so that they have to reset them, and when you watch them setting up the pieces you can see the physical dexterity with which they handle the pieces, and that will tell you how good they are at speed chess.
Then you sit down, and first you ask if the person is going to pay the winner. Some people will just act like you’re going to pay them to play. Then even if you win, you won’t get paid. So first make sure you’re going to get paid. The second thing is to decide how much. Two dollars a game, three dollars a game, five, or more.
TM: What’s the most you’ve ever bet?
JB: I played a $50 game once.
TM: Did you win?
JB: Yes. Although I’d lost the three or four previous games, so it came out even. I just want to come out even.
TM: Your author biography says, “He is an assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and teaches classes on lying, lucid dreaming, and general practice.” What does that mean?
JB: There are different ways to get better at writing. You can improve the technique, you can change the content of what you write, and you can change the general organization of your thought. Most of teaching writing revolves around fixing technique. I think that that’s okay. But to me, most of the issues that a person has with technique will automatically be fixed by reading a lot of good books and by doing a lot of writing. Even though it might take ten years, those things will be fixed. The thing that I think that’s a better path to becoming good is to work on those other things—the content, to find things you love to write about, and then to become sharper and clearer at thinking. So my class—the classes on lucid dreaming, on lying, or walking—those make people live better, more interesting lives and then whatever they write will be better.
TM: What would be a typical lesson plan for your lucid dreaming class?
JB: There’s been a lot of research done about lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is the quality a dream has when you become completely conscious and you can control what happens in the dream. There have been Tibetan dream yogis who have done lots of work on this, and there’s a guy named Stephen LaBerge who wrote a number of books that are really wonderful about lucid dreaming. I model my course on some of his methods. The attempt is to make it so the students will be able to lucid dream by the end of the course. I’ve been pretty successful. I taught it a couple of semesters ago and I’m teaching it in the fall.
TM: Do the students keep a dream journal?
JB: It is one of the things, yes. Many of the techniques have to do with establishing habits, which you establish in your daily life so that the habit will occur in the dream. For example, every time you cross a threshold—a doorway, putting your head out of a window, getting out of a car—you force yourself to stop for a second and ask yourself if you're dreaming.
Then hopefully in your dream anytime you cross a threshold the habit is so engrained as a part of your personality that you then in the dream say, “Am I dreaming?” and the answer at that point is yes. But it’s more complicated than that because in the dream you don’t think that you're dreaming. So you need to have a test within the dream to establish whether you’re dreaming or not.
There are a number of different tests. Any kind of digital numbers get messed up. If there’s a clock on your wrist that has a digital read-out, you look at it, look away, then look back and if it’s all messed up, you know that you’re in a dream. Text in general doesn’t tend to stay the same. So you cross a threshold in the dream, and you say, “Okay, am I dreaming?” Then you look around and try to find some text, look at it, read it, look away, look back and it will likely have changed.
TM: So once you have that knowledge, that the dream is a dream, what’s the point?
JB: At that point, you can fly around….
TM: You have complete control.
JB: Absolutely. You can make a gigantic whale jumping out of the water.
TM: What was the last lucid dream that you had?
JB: I had one a few weeks ago. But in the fall I’ll be doing it a lot. I try to do the exercises along with the class. I had a friend who was obsessed with recording his dreams. It’s a world that expands the more you get into it. So he was recoding his dreams every night, and every morning he would wake up and write for five minutes. Eventually it got to be that it was taking an hour and half to record all of the dreams he was remembering. So he had piles and piles of notebooks. For me, being able to focus on the dreaming and recording it depends on my stepdaughter, who is going to be 12 in August. She has to get ready and go to school, so the morning time gets messed up.
TM: I can completely see the effect of this in the book, because it had such a dream-like quality. It’s imaginative in the way that in a dream some things don’t seem logical or normal but you accept them as true (for the duration of the story). That’s how The Curfew was for me. The main character’s job is an epitaphorist (he writes epitaphs on gravestones); did you make that up?
JB: I did. I’ve always been obsessed with cemeteries, and I think it’s a good thing to put things in your book that you love. I saw the dramatic possibilities of the profession. Many people’s day-to-day work might be really interesting, but just showing one day of that might not be so interesting. For some people, what they're doing is completely fascinating, but just one day would be enough. In this case it’s a profession where I can give these little encounters, each one is a kernel.
TM: I think the structure of your book is very interesting; I read it all in one night and I was trying to figure out why the pages went so quickly. Some pages are just one giant word.
JB: That’s one thing that I prize. The reader should be able to ingest the material whole, and they instinctively know what to do with it. What’s actually going on at the moment [in the story] should be very clear. Sometimes people will talk about my books as being experimental, but they’re not. They might appear to be experimental because they look a little different, but they’re quite old-fashioned especially in the responsibilities I take in regards to telling the story. I think that the responsibility that the storyteller has in reaching the audience is an ancient one, and is very important. What I want is to make a path through the tale so the reader can fly through it, and maybe not get everything the first time, but get enough just by virtue of passing through. I want all the details to fall into place. I think transparency is always good.
TM: So is it the narrative that drives your writing or is it something more theoretical?
JB: [The Curfew] is a manual about how to live in a difficult time.
TM: But then the answer is to escape. The last part of the book is a puppet show, an escape into fantasy to avoid reality.
JB: In some ways it could be deemed as escape, but it’s also her way of grappling with and overcoming the events. She’s making up an account of the times, in the time. And that’s something important—for people to have a historical sense and take the facts of what they see and put them together for themselves—take that responsibility. Too many people let someone else see the work and say what happened.
TM: Her control over the puppet show, and writing the script, is like your lucid dreaming, you get in there and you take control.
JB: Absolutely. Also there are so many things she remembers from her childhood, and in the dream you're not only supplied with the current context of where you are, but you remember a whole bunch of memories in a dream.
TM:Your website is very fun and interactive. It kind of reminds me of the book because you first think, “What is going on here?” And then you just accept it and enjoy it.
JB: There are different philosophies for how to make a website. There are basic ideas about entertainment. Whether a person should be allowed to always be deciding what will entertain them or how they will be entertained, or whether the person will make themselves subjective to entertainment that then whisks them off their feet—then at the end they enjoyed it or didn’t. I think we have so much of that first kind—always in control of how you’re being entertained—that I think a little bit of the other kind is good. The website is definitely of the latter camp.
TM: You said earlier that you have a stepdaughter. Do you get a lot of practice telling her stories?
JB: Yes. I first met her when she was five. I was telling her a story one day and I was completely inspired and taken aback and shocked by the power a story can have over children. When you’re used to adults, and reading to adults, the best you can get is 50 or 60 percent of their attention. It makes it hard to powerfully emote, and become totally dedicated to that storytelling moment if you're not getting the energy back. I was telling her the folktale of the frog and the scorpion. The scorpion is at the river and he wants to cross. He sees a frog there so he asks him to ferry him across on his back and the frog says, “No, you're a scorpion! You're going to sting me!” And the scorpion says, “No! Why would I do that? We would both drown!” The frog says, “You're right, I’ll carry you across.” So they get about halfway across and the scorpion stings the frog, and as they both sink the frog says, “Why did you sting me!” and the scorpion says, “Because I’m a scorpion!”
TM: What was her reaction?
JB: When the scorpion stings the frog and the frog starts sinking, she burst out crying, powerful convulsive tears, so intense. She probably felt that she was the frog, and felt that she was the scorpion. I found that very inspiring, because it’s not just for children—you can reach adults that way, but it has to be delicately. You have to get them to forget they're adults.
TM: Do you get a lot of feedback from your students about your books?
JB: They’re usually pretty happy about the whole thing. They might be too kind.
TM: Because they’re trying to get a good grade? How do you get graded in lucid dreaming?
JB: Well the class is pass/fail. The main thing is you have to write a manuscript later. I don’t have to grade their grasp of dreams with a D or an F.
TM: Are you working on anything new?
JB: I have another book coming out in July. It’s an omnibus with two books of poetry, two books of short prose, and two novellas, all condensed into this small, pocket volume that you could take on the train. It’s by Milkweed publishing, called The Village on Horseback. See Also:The Three Worlds of Jesse Ball’s The Curfew(Image from jesseball.com)

6 comments:

Il’ja, once again I am so thankful to hear your thinking on such divisive topics!

The resurgence of interest in hamfisted collective solutions amongst citizens of the former USSR is as disturbing as the wild shift right of right on our side of the pond. Imagine, in 2016, a Presidential candidate whose most fervid constituency allies itself with the Klan and any number of disaffected Aryan Nation splinter groups. Your piece is an excellent meditation on beliefs and believers, and the tyranny of vague, inflated language (Freedom, Country, Patriotism, etc.) over actual thought and discussion. Of course, it pertains to all of us. I will be looking for Ms. Alexievich’s work. And yours — your thoughtful pieces are always surprising, difficult, and true. Thanks!

Very interesting piece, which I’ve finally had the time to read, early in the morning, when things are quiet enough to do longer pieces like this justice.

The thing to remember (I reminded myself, as I read this) is that Alexievich can’t be blamed for winning the N(at)obel, a prize which is as politically neutral as the Eurovision song contest. My only quibble is with this, from her:

“American oversight played a big role in Germany coming to an understanding of its past, and we didn’t have that advantage.”

Which is a complex baklava of “not quite right”, for such a short sentence, and presents that same old benignly paternal America too many of us still love to love (and which never existed). What America oversaw, among other things, was the massive relocation of wholly culpable Nazi engineers, scientists and intelligence specialists (et al) to Floridian homes with swimming pools. Which is not an entirely off piste comment (yet) because it was all part of the greater effort to “beat the Russkies” during Cold War 1.0 .The (even more culpable) German Industrialists… under American oversight… merely continued to go about their business.

The real battles are never between the Caesars (POTUS and Putin, say) but between the Caesars and their subjects. We Serfs are just pyramid-builders, breeders and canon-fodder (when we aren’t just useless eaters) who can only appear to be significant, from the Caesars’ POVs, in clumps of a million at a time. Power habitually views us through the wrong end of its telescope; we can appreciate the fact that Alexievitch works against that distortion (and at considerable risk).

your generosity will be the ruin of you. Still, knowing that I have a reader of your discernment interested in something I wrote leaves me in a pretty good place. I am grateful.

During her wide-ranging remarks, Ms. Alexievich mentioned Trump once. She confessed a general ignorance of the mystery of American Presidential politics, but did say that even a deeply flawed choice of candidates is preferable to the alternative. As gruesome as that seems on the surface, it’s hard to argue. Though, yes, we can do better.

benigne,

il’ja

@steven augustine

The Russian word Ms. Alexievich used to describe post-war American involvement in Germany was “patronazh”. I chose to translate it as “oversight” rather than “patronage”, given the broader context of her remarks on self-determination, and given our western tendency to associate “patronage” purely with money.

Yet I wouldn’t rush to assume that she is unaware of the dark side of American foreign policy simply because she is a fan of certain publicly palatable aspects of the Marshall Plan. She is painfully – and personally – familiar with the consequences of leaders so obsessed with the big picture that they ignore the very real cost in human suffering that the implementation of that plan entails.

From her vantage point, though, as a critic of the totalitarian regime, she would undoubtedly caution us against employing false equivalencies when comparing the brutality of the Soviet regime with the regrettable failures of mind and heart evident in American domestic & foreign policy.

Please do not read this as an attempt at one-upmanship – oh, you got Cheney & Rumsfeld? Let me tell you about Dzershinsky & Beria! – but rather, one former Soviet subject’s view (a view shared by a majority of Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians today). In comparison with her own State – which, as an example, took liberated Soviet soldier POW’s and threw them back into prison in the USSR for the crime of “having been captured alive”, and which sent to Siberia those private Soviet citizens who had been captured by Germany for use as “ostarbeiteren” – compared to that, America was a liberator. (No slight toward the tremendous sacrifice of the Red Army and the Soviet people in their fight against Hitler should be inferred.) Whatever other dubious activities undertaken by the post-War State Department, Germany, Germans, got help. Soviets got Stalin.

I’ll repeat myself: I am glad to have readers of your caliber. Thanks.

Il’ja, I am glad that what beggared belief (and it does, as do all tales of human rights abuses), was accepted as truth. I read “Voices from Chernobyl”. Ms. Alexievich clearly and validly has some form of PTSD, little wonder. Perhaps she keeps her reports somewhat vague in order to protect the innocent. The murder of journalists is frightening; I had no idea the number was so high in Russia. Priskill speaks of Trump, (I am Canadian with that child Trudeau running things, could be worse) and with Trump running the country America will have its own iron fist with an intellectually deficient man. American foreign policy, bad as it is now, will deteriorate further. What a piece of work is man. Its almost shaming to sit in my cosy house reading The Gulag, Annie Applebaum, William Shirer’s The Third Reich. The brain can’t take it in. So in my small way I try to contribute by joining Amnesty International and Journalists without Borders. We must, and yet we can’t keep journalists safe, those brave men and women who alert us to atrocities. Il’ja keep writing. You have a lovely way with words, very absorbing.

Thanks for reading the ‘hard stuff’ and for your part in Amnesty and JwB. The attacks on the press in Ukraine are rare compared with those in Russia, but they have taken place. During the protests in Kyiv & elsewhere, the then-Presidential Admin gave orders to the riot cops to target journalists. Later, when things turned ugly, the order was modified: journalists and red cross workers.

That this shit still goes on in the second decade of the 21st century shouldn’t really surprise us. Like you say, human nature is what it is what it was what it will be. And the committing of such open acts of violence against individual dignity, expression, and the rule of law cannot be shrugged off as “restricted to the semi-barbarians of the two-thirds world, like the old USSR”. If Trump is pulling the kind of support that he currently enjoys, then the disease isn’t restricted to the hinterlands – it has gone mainstream.

I guess that’s most of my take on why Alexievich is important for North American readers – she lets common folks open up about how bad it can get when demagoguery, ideology, and impotent parochialism are allowed to fester. Repentance, she shows us, starts at home. And thanks for reading me.

Nikolai Grozni’s debut novel, Wunderkind, is a searing tale of music behind the Iron Curtain, two years before the fall of Communism. Konstantin, a 15 year-old piano prodigy, is a student at the Sofia School for the Gifted, and spends his time raging against the inhumanity of the regime, acting out, rebelling against his teachers, and playing the piano with desperate abandon. It is an outright autobiographical text, Grozni admits; he himself was an accomplished concert pianist in his youth, and studied at the Sofia School for the Gifted in the late 1980s. After stints at the Berklee College of Music and a Buddhist monastery, he obtained his MFA in creative writing from Brown, and currently lives in France.
One of the most beautiful things about Wunderkind is its contrasts in tone-- like Chopin’s Ballade No 2, which Konstantin takes on, knowing that it is “too elusive, too impossible to measure” even to be meaningfully recorded; it begins with a Mozart-esque simplicity, and then moves into more moody territory, before exploding with rage. Grozni captures the angst of adolescence as Konstantin moves through the sad beauty of Sofia in a way that seems almost romantic; but those passages will be followed by reminders of the inhumanity of the world he lives in. It is a landscape that recalls Ishiguro’sNever Let Me Go -- Grozni’s characters are doomed by the system but full of life and hope, scraps of beauty in a dystopian paradise. With a blistering narrative of violence and lyricism, Grozni captures them playing their instruments.
“Nothing is more difficult than to talk about music,” wrote the composer Camille Saint-Saëns of his own attempts at writing music criticism; “it is already tricky enough for musicians, but it is almost impossible for others: even the strongest, most subtle minds lose their way.” Grozni manages to pull off the near-impossible feat of not only writing about music, but of doing so in a way that pushes the reader to the limits of what language can express.
I had a chance to chat with him when he was in Paris to read at Shakespeare & Co.
The Millions: You really nail the anxieties of being a musician in this book. That passage where Konstantin describes the feeling of becoming incredibly self-conscious while performing, and to continue performing you have to forget what you’re doing again -- it’s so right on. To a certain extent, when you’re playing the piano, you have to just not think about what you’re doing. How is it for you with writing? Is there a similar call for conscious unconsciousness?
Nikolai Grozni: Absolutely, only in writing it is much more difficult to achieve. When you play an instrument you can always count on the sounds and harmonies, even accidental ones, to carry you away. With writing all you have is the sound of your own thoughts. It could be maddening, boring, or cathartic.
TM: I think one of the things that says so much about Konstantin and the problems he has living under the Communist regime is the fact that he can’t commit to one set of fingering -- “By the time I learned a piece well, I had access to at least three or four sets of fingerings, which added a degree of unpredictability to my playing because I could never really know for certain how my fingers would fall when I walked onstage and faced the grand piano.” This seems irresponsible or self-destructive on one level, but is also perhaps a safeguard against becoming an automaton, because it makes it more likely that you will remain uncomfortably conscious during the performance. How does this fit in with the larger subject of the book? It seems everyone around Konstantin is a Communist automaton, whereas all the “misfits” of the school -- Vadim, Irina, Konstantin -- have this uncomfortable awareness. It doesn’t necessarily serve them well.
NG: It's true, Konstantin's biggest fear is that he will become an automaton, a cogwheel in the system, like all the rest. This affects his piano playing as well. He is constantly aware of the dangers of playing a piece the same exact way again and again. This is the reason why he also can't write anything during his literature exam -- he is afraid that by allowing the thoughts of the teachers, of the apparatchiks, in his head, he will become one of them. What fuels his rebellion is a deep sense of anger at the world around him, and, ultimately, this very anger destroys both him and Irina. But Konstantin wants to fail, that is the paradox. He feels that if he fails he will have proven to himself that didn't get corrupted.
TM: Your descriptions of the music are wonderfully synaesthetic -- did that come naturally? Were you always thinking about music in literary terms, even back then?
NG: I've always thought about harmonies, notes, and passages in terms of colors and visual portraits. I think this probably comes naturally to kids with perfect pitch -- when you have nothing else to hold on to but sound, you begin adding colors, feelings, and ideas. Mussorgsky'sPictures at an Exhibition is a perfect example of how a composer sees the music.
TM: Are there other writers who have written about music who influenced you, either positively or negatively?
NG: For me, Franz Liszt'sLife of Chopin is one of the best books about music. Chopin's letters and George Sand's diaries are also excellent sources of inspiration. Thomas Bernhard'sThe Loser is a fantastic book but there's not much music in it. When I set out to write Wunderkind I wanted the book to look like a conductor's score.
TH: You have this fascinating passage in the novel where Konstantin claims that Chopin is the only composer to write in the first person, speaking directly from his own experience, whereas other composers are writing in the third person, telling out about things that happened to other people. It’s an interesting observation coming in the middle of a novel in the first person. Do you share his impatience with the third person?
NG: I love the first person, in writing, in music, and in life. All great modern novels, as far as I am concerned, are in the first person (Celine'sJourney to the End of the Night, Beckett'sThe Unnamable, etc.). Incidentally, all three of my Bulgarian novels were written in the third person, and I think there are many advantages of telling a story in an omniscient voice -- the ease of changing stage sets, of doing travel, exposition, tension, and, very importantly, humor -- but, in the end, I felt that I would never be able to go far enough in revealing consciousness in the third person. For me, the purpose of writing and reading is to understand and reveal the mind, and while there's a great deal that can be glimpsed and inferred about the mind and the human condition from third person stories like Chekov's "A Nervous Breakdown," they can hardly compare with the authenticity, depth, and rawness of the first person narrator in Dostoevsky'sNotes from the Underground. After all, third person means someone else; first person means you.
TM: Can you talk a bit about the frequent use of mythological material (Icarus; Prometheus; Erebus, god of Chaos; Erinyes, the Furies)? You seem to be rooting Bulgaria in this heroic, invented past; there were so many mentions of Thracians that I had to look them up -- they are a tribe from Greece who were apparently the original settlers of Sofia -- and was delighted to find that Orpheus was meant to have been king of the Thracian tribe of Cicones!
NG: You don't have to do a lot of digging in Bulgaria to find the old gods. The pagan past is very palpable and vivid even today. There are cults of sun-worshipers who wake before dawn and perform oblations at sunrise; there are thousands of ancient temples and pagan sites in the mountains, a lot of them still waiting to be excavated. Orpheus is believed to have descended to the underworld by entering a cave in the Rhodope Mountains. On top of that, Bulgaria is a place where black magic has always played a very powerful role. When you hear that someone is a witch or a sorcerer, it's not at all a joke. People pay a lot of money to destroy someone through magic.
TM: Were you really a monk in India? How did that come about?
NG: I've always wanted to live in India. Even as a small child I was convinced that if someone wanted to meet the wise men and learn the truth, he or she would have to go to India and live up in the mountains. So, one day, while I was still in college, I just packed my bags and left for India. I stayed there more than four years, and, yes, I was a Buddhist monk. I learned Tibetan and studied at one of the best Tibetan Buddhist universities.
TM: How did you end up in France?
NG: I'm not sure. It started as a why-not idea, and I'm still here, three years later.
Image courtesy Cara Tobe